Elon Musk confirmed what the Tesla support pages have already hinted at: the company’s new vehicles will be delivered to owners without a universal mobile chargersomething that the brand has been doing for years with every model that leaves its factories.
Charging questionable It has rather limited features.. According to Tesla’s support manual, it’s capable of delivering just under 3kW of power when plugged into an outlet. schuko, widely used in Europe. This means to download Model 3 with a smaller battery, you’ll need almost a whole day.
Why does Tesla offer a charger with these specifications? Simple: it is intended for specific cases in which a faster solution is not possible. For example: you go on a spiritual retreat for a week in a rural house, lost in the middle of the mountains, where it is impossible to find a charger for an electric car relatively close by.
But why does Tesla’s solution make sense?
The three most common methods for recharging an electric vehicle are:
- When the car is parked in the garage of your permanent residence, you connect it to electricity using a wall charger sold separately by Tesla, known as Charger– or by using a device from another company, such as the Wallbox, which is compatible with the standard. These types of solutions are usually able to fully charge a car battery overnight.
- When you’re on the road – or if you don’t have the ability to set up a charger at home – you turn to fast chargers. This can take the battery level from 10% to 80% in about 30 minutes. And by the way, the number of chargers at this rate is increasing significantly across European geography.
- When you go to places like malls, parking or hotels that have charging points, sometimes free. You use them to get some electric juice while the car is stationary. These are known as destination charging points.
Given these three options, how many times the owner Tesla ends up resorting to the aforementioned portable charger turns out to be quite small.because you almost always have better solutions at your disposal. And as infrastructure grows, the cases in which it is needed are reduced more and more.
The reality that Elon Musk himself confirmed on twitter with reference to internal company data. “Usage stats were very low, so it felt like a waste of time,” he said.
And yes, from an owner’s point of view, it’s normal to think that such an accessory would not hurt, given that the price of Tesla is over 50,000 euros. But the company evaluates these decisions from a business point of view. And from this prism there is no point in continuing to give away for free an accessory that your customers hardly use and, except in very specific cases, does not affect the operation of your equipment at all, so it is 100% consumable.
How much Tesla costs to make such a charger is a mystery. But whatever the number, we must multiply it by the total number of cars that the brand produces each year. In 2021, there were almost a million of them. So, reduce the cost of each car by $100 – provided that this is the production price of the aforementioned charger – this will result in savings of about 100 million dollars every year.
If you add these numbers to the usage statistics that Elon Musk refers to, it makes perfect sense for the company to make that decision. The impact on your customer experience is almost nil but instead, the company saves several million dollars.
To compensate for this movement, Elon Musk announcement that Tesla will cut the price of a portable charger to $200 and will include more adapters in the package. Thus, those who urgently need a similar product for specific use cases will be able to purchase it without any problems.
Source: Hiper Textual
